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The no-pants guide to spending, saving, and thriving in the real world.

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Naked Money

Finance, Parenting

In our house, the bills don’t get hidden. I’ve never tried to hide our finances from our children. I believe doing that is part of the reason I reached adulthood with no brakes. Growing up, finances were almost entirely invisible.  Now, I believe is financial transparency.

Now, as a father, I balance the checkbook and pay bills on the laptop in the living room where my children can see me. They see the stack of bills and they watch me balance the checkbook. We discuss how much things cost and how we can cut expenses while the bills are being paid.  Even the toddlers know Daddy is doing something important.

My ten-year-old son knows what sales tax is and where to find it on a receipt. He knows what property taxes are and how much they are in our neighborhood. He knows roughly what percentage of a paycheck gets withheld. I work to make my son financially aware. My girls are too young to understand the concept of money, but they will be receiving a thorough financial education as soon as they are able to grasp the concepts.

The hard part is explaining to my son how we screwed up our finances. I’ve shown him my paycheck and discussed our debt. I have explained to him that we were making much less money when we accumulated our doom debt, while maintaining a higher standard of living.  Now, when we go to the store, he doesn’t even ask if he can borrow money until we get to his bank account.  He has learned to dislike debt in almost all forms.  I’m fairly proud that my kid voluntarily practices delayed gratification.

What he doesn’t quite grasp is the idea of living within your means, even if your means are limited.   “But, Dad, what if you don’t have much money?  Then you have to borrow money for nice things, right?”  I’m not sure how to break him of that.  Delayed gratification is an understandable concept for him, but the difference between wants and needs seems to be missing.   Any ideas?

 

Single Income Family

Finance

Effective next week, we are officially a single-income family.

If you can count all of my side-hustles as “single income”.

This week, my wife did the paperwork for her final week of state-sponsored unemployment.  She also applied for the federal extension, but that’s not automatic.

In a nutshell, this reduces our monthly income by $1340.

What does that mean for us?

1.  Our truck, which I was hoping to have paid off by March(3 months ago), still has about 7 regular-sized payments left.  Instead of making double payments, we’re now making the schedule amount.  The reason for the payoff delay is another post entirely.  Savings: $400.  In a pinch, we could stop making payments for almost 3 years due to how much we’ve already paid.

2.  The riding lessons I use to spoil my girls are cut in half.  Instead of weekly lessons, we’re going bi-weekly.  Savings: $100.  In a pinch, this could go away completely.

3.  We had a conversation that included, “Honey, when I complain that you bought more than our weekly budget of food in one trip, I’m not being a dick.  Here’s how much money we have.”  That conversation appears to have been productive.

4.  No vacation this year.  We let our spending jump a couple of times this year, so last week, I dropped most of our vacation fund to make up for it.  The expense of being matron-of-honor at a wedding will be an upcoming post, too.

[Edit]

5.  My wife is working at our daycare provider 2 days per week in exchange for daycare discounts.    Financially, this isn’t perfect, but it cuts the cost and gets the girls out of the house.  I work from home and have a hard time keeping them out of the office.

6.  We are considering long-term stay-at-home status for my wife.

[End Edit]

Right now, our budget says we make $100 more than we spend.  That includes all of our savings goals, and setting aside money for some luxuries like our Halloween party.   We’re not hurting–which makes me happy–but we do have to watch our expenses in a way that has just become mandatory.

I can’t tell you how happy I am to have renters.  Between our roommate here and the renters in the house we fixed up last year, we’re adding about $1000 to our income.   Rent is keeping us cash-flow positive.

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Building 5 Bad Habits

Finance

Meth powder hexagon
Meth powder hexagon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Good habits are boring. I mean, yes, they will help you succeed and provide some security, but so what? Bad habits are fun. Except meth. Meth is a bad habit that is decidedly not fun. Don’t do meth.  Seriously.

There are so many entertaining bad habits that I couldn’t possibly cover them all. I’m going to stick to the bad financial habits that will make your life more exciting.

  1. Break your budget. A budget constrains you, keeps you from buying the things you want and traveling to distant, exotic places when you know you can’t afford the trip.   The best way to build this habit is to not only avoid tracking your expenses, but also avoid tracking what you actually spend.  If you don’t know what you owe or what you’ve spent, the end of every month is an adventure!
  2. Impulse shopping. For the next week, I want you to go to your favorite store every day.  Buy the first thing you see that makes you want to hum.  Every day.  Don’t worry about being able to afford it.  That’s what credit is for, right?  Bonus points for buying it on the “no interest for a year, then we screw you” plan.   I’m sure you’ll be making more money by the time the bill is due.   You could get lucky and have a rich relative die and leave you a fortune.   That’s like winning the lottery twice, because you won’t have to buy him Christmas cards anymore.
  3. Meals on the go. Cooking is a drag.  Besides, who wants to slap a slice of meat and cheese on a couple slices of bread, when you can get a drive-through case of the Aztec two-step for $5.    Did you know that the big yellow ‘M’ stands for “Montezuma?”   On your way to practice impulse shopping, pick up some lunch.   For your money, you’ll get less convenience, more additives, and the opportunity to gamble on the lunch employees caring as much about cleanliness as you do.  It’s a win for everyone!
  4. Ego shopping. Actual accomplishments and improvement are hard.  It’s much better to wrap up your sense of self-worth in the smartest phone, the shiniest car, or the Gucciest purse.   Allowing Mastercard to finance your self-esteem guarantees that your next smile is just a shopping trip away.   Who needs the hassle of dealing with things that matter?   After your impulse purchase, buy something fancy!  Show your friends that you are not only a more discerning consumer, but also that you are better than they are. Watch them turn green with envy.  When they shrug and tell your that their phone has the one feature they need–the ability to ring when called–know that it is envy speaking.
  5. Expensive Vacations. You need to relax.   I know how hard it is lugging that iBlackPhoneP(a/o)doid in and out of the designer sportscar with all-leather cow interior and big, brown baby seal-eyes for headlights.   It’s work.    Back and forth buying crap you don’t need to fuel your ego, dodging vicious calls from creditors and having to Dine-N-Dash every time a friend invites you out for dinner makes a dude tired. Take a week in Europe to calm your thoughts.   You deserve it, even if you don’t actually have the money for it.   Isn’t Great-Uncle Horace sick?

What are your favorite bad habits?

Update:  This post has been included in the Carnival of Personal Finance.

Saving Money: The Warranty Fund

Finance

Home theater projection screen displaying a hi...
Image via Wikipedia

Last weekend, my DVD player died.

No big deal, right?  We watch a lot of movies. We get a lot of enjoyment out of watching a lot of movies.  Movies are fun for us.  We’ve got a projector and a movie screen in our living room.  Movies are our biggest pastime.   Naturally, losing the movie machine hurts.

The thing that hurts the most is that this hasn’t been a good month for us, financially.  My wife gets paid hourly, with semi-monthly paychecks.  This means that, in a short month(like February!), her second paycheck is small by a few hundred dollars.   When her company switched to that nonsensical plan, I watched for a few months, then set our budget to match the smallest paycheck she received.   They haven’t been using this ridiculous plan for a full year, yet.

February caught me by surprise.

I know, it shouldn’t have.  According to my research, there has been a February in every single year since well before I was born.  I should have been expecting it.  Oops.

So, to recap:  our favorite pastime was dead and money was a little bit tight.   There was no money to shake out of the budget to cover a new DVD player and there was no way we’d hit our emergency fund for something as frivolous—if enjoyable—as movies.

What to do?

About a year ago, I decided to start a warranty fund.  There are things we can’t easily afford to replace, so we pay for warranties on some of them.  For example, our cell phones have a repair plan, and that plan has saved us more than it has cost us.  We have a repair plan for some of our appliances, and that, too, has saved more than it has cost us.  My goal was to self-warranty my stuff.  I wanted an account that had money that served no purpoase but to help me avoid paying for warranties.

I set up another ING Direct savings account and scheduled an automatic deposit.  It’s only set to deposit $25 per month, but over a year, it was enough to replace our home theater system, with some left over.   It is, quite simply, money to use when our stuff breaks.

With no warning, and no time to prepare, we still had enough money socked aside to handle one of life’s little surprises, without wrecking our plans.

How do you prepare to replace the things that are going to break?

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Reason #45,682 Why It’s Good To Have An Emergency Fund

Finance, Life

My mother-in-law died two weeks ago.

It’s sad, but I’m not going to get into the emotional devastation that comes with the death of a loved one here.  At least, not today.

Today, I’m going to talk about the money, but not the funeral expenses.

I’m talking about the expense of taking over her stuff.  When she died, she was living in her own home, paying her own bills.

Now, we have a small stack of expenses we weren’t planning for.

She had 2 cars.   She actively drove one, and kept storage insurance on one that was parked in the driveway.  Combined with the homeowner’s insurance, that’s $110/month.

One of the cars has a loan.   The car is worth $4000 more than the loan, so it’s not worth letting the bank repossess it.   That’s another $200/month.

The gas and electric add $50 to the monthly tab.

Setting aside money for the property tax adds nearly another $200 per month and the first half is due next week.

I rounded the numbers off here, but that’s $562.58 that’s outside of our regular budget and doesn’t address some bills that we paid off instead of arguing with bill collectors while we straighten out the estate.

This is the kind of scenario that makes me happy to have an emergency fund.  We are able to pay the property taxes and keep the lights on because of it.  A few years ago?   The car would have been gone and the house dark within a month.

Now?  The emergency fund covers the immediate expenses and we have some breathing room to adjust our budget.   For example, the money we were setting aside for our next car is now being earmarked for paying off our surprise car loan.

 

 

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Automatic Oopsie

Finance

When I found myself doing an abrupt unemployment tour this month,  the first thing I did was dig into my budget.  I did it so I could see how long it would be before our finances got scary and to see what could be eliminated.

English: A Netflix envelope picture taken by B...
English: A Netflix envelope picture taken by BlueMint. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gah!  So much could be eliminated.

There were things that I’d set up on automatic payments, added to my budget, then ignored.

There were things that I’d signed up for and used, but didn’t get as much enjoyment out of any more.

Example Number 1:  Netflix

We love Netflix.  It gets used every single day.  But the DVDs often sit on the kitchen counter for a month before we get around to watching them.  We clearly don’t need the DVD plan any more.

Example Number 2: Software Subscription

I use some software to track the Google rank of several of my websites.  There is an addon that makes the software work much better.  The addon costs $20 per quarter.   The problem is that I’m not looking at the rankings of these sites any more.  Some of the sites have been shut down, or I’m no longer involved with the clients.  That makes the paid addon a total waste.  I canceled it and told the tracking software to run slower so it would give Google a fit.

Example Number 3: Extra Domains

Hello, my name is Jason and I’m a domain addict.  Seriously, for a while, I was buying domains every time I had a good idea for a website.  Some of them were developed, and some were sketched out and put on hold.   I also bought domains to help with the search engine rankings of the developed websites.   I topped out at about 120 domains.  All of them were on auto-renew.   I’ve been letting them expire, but some didn’t have the auto-renew settings changed, so they (surprise!) renewed automatically.

These are just three examples of several years of development, exploration, and automation of my complicated financial life, and they add up to more than $100 a month essentially wasted.

Here’s what I want you to do.

Right now.

Not “tomorrow”, not “when you get around to it”.

Now.

Pull up your bank statement, your Paypal account and your credit card statements.

Is there anything in there that’s happening every month that you forgot about, don’t need, or don’t even want?

Ax that crap.  Kill it with fire.  Nuke it from orbit. Stop wasting your money.

I’d be willing to bet 99% of everyone has something they are paying for every month that they don’t even want, but either forgot was happening or have just let inertia keep paying the bills.

Be the 1%.